ALL ENTRIES FROM September 2006

September 01, 2006

ALL ENTRIES FROM August 2006

August 02, 2006

Many of you know about the current wave of admissions by the LitBloggers about what they look for in a novel. (Start here at Scott Esposito’s recent Friday Column.)

When I first learned of the discussion, I recalled that Greg and I don’t often speak in public about what it is we look for in a manuscript, beyond saying that we want to publish “unfamiliar stories well told” or using some other such phrase that we’re truly sincere about but that keeps agents from pigeonholing us — either together or separately.

ALL ENTRIES FROM February 2006

February 08, 2006

Like all good Vermont authors, Marc Estrin is a Dickensian. He travels those winding little New England roads from rehearsal to demonstration and home, accompanied by audiotapes of Dickens novels. I would be certain of a political underpinning to that happenstance were it not that John Irving apparently stands upon the end of the political seesaw opposite from Marc’s.

January 05, 2006

My wife says I use “penultimate” as though people understand it. I tell her it’s just more efficient.

She and the rest of my family went out shopping again this afternoon, and so I had some time to focus on the manuscript that’s been chiding me for a few weeks — a story collection from an agent we haven’t worked with yet but an author I’ve read before. I read the first story and it made me sad. That’s good. Emotion is good.

ALL ENTRIES FROM October 2005

October 31, 2005

I’ve been reading and thinking a lot lately about book marketing and readership. I’ve come across lots of soul searching and hand wringing, lots of great advice, some of which I even subscribe to, about the virtues of author tours and creating buzz instead of reliance on dwindling—in both space and impact—reviews and on advertising and branding. I’ll admit to the hand wringing myself, if not to the soul searching.

October 05, 2005

I just signed a contract for a memoir that has set me to thinking—not because of the subject of the book, not because of the nature of the writing (or maybe so, but I’ll get back to that), and not because it is an historically revealing memoir. Indeed, what set me to thinking was not the book at all.

ALL ENTRIES FROM September 2005

September 21, 2005

Finding some reading time on my hands this summer, I polished off Unbridled Books’ two Ed Falco titles in succession – Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha, followed by Wolf Point. From time to time, I found myself brushing this pesky fly from in front of my face: “Good grief—this guy is Carmella Soprano’s [Edie Falco’s] Uncle!”

If you think about it, the association doesn’t seem entirely frivolous. There is a dark necessity that drives the lives of the compromised characters in The Sopranos, the ones I find the most interesting, like Carmella. In order to survive, she is compelled to live in a delusional universe – to maintain a basic disconnect from reality. And woe to Carmella when she confuses the two and tries to divorce Tony, for instance, as she did this past season. Reality will out.

September 07, 2005

I had wanted to post an entry here last week. But in light of Katrina it seemed trivial if not unsavory to do so. These are only publishing matters, after all. With the first evacuees arriving in Colorado — as elsewhere — some sense that the nation is not still only flailing in high water arises. There’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said, at least silently.

* * *

In the August 22 issue of Business Week, Jonathan Karp explained his new imprint, Warner Twelve — so named because it is slated to publish twelve (12) books a year. He is doing this, he says, to afford him the opportunity to promise “authors and their literary agents that we will publishing nothing other than their books for a full month.”

We at Unbridled suspect he will quickly learn that — for the books he handles that are neither blockbuster novels nor celebrity-authored — “a full month” is nowhere near long enough.

ALL ENTRIES FROM August 2005

August 25, 2005

The recent Associated Press wire story by Hillel Italie —“Pickings Thin for 2005 Literary Fiction”— seems to have sparked conversation in the Off-the-Island Bookworld. It certainly has us scratching our heads and waving our arms in reaction to the presuppositions that permeate the article. Wasn’t the question about literary fiction?